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Software Techniques for Good Practice in Audio and Music Research

In this paper we discuss how software development can be improved in the audio and music research community by implementing tighter and more effective development feedback loops. We suggest first that researchers in an academic environment can benefit from the straightforward application of peer code review, even for ad-hoc research software; and second, that researchers should adopt automated software unit testing from the start of research projects. We discuss and illustrate how to adopt both code reviews and unit testing in a research environment. Finally, we observe that the use of a software version control system provides support for the foundations of both code reviews and automated unit tests. We therefore also propose that researchers should use version control with all their projects from the earliest stage.